Conferees Reject Helms Proposal To Restrict Financing of the Arts

A House and Senate conference committee today rejected a proposal to prohibit Federal financing of art that violates broadly defined moral standards.

It acted after the Senate voted down the same proposal, introduced by Senator Jesse Helms, Republican of North Carolina, in a stormy debate Thursday night and in the early hours today.

In place of that plan, the seven Senators and five members of the House unanimously agreed on relatively mild restrictions for the National Endowment for the Arts, which angered Congress this year by its support of photographic exhibitions that included homoerotic images by the late Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano's picture of a crucifix submerged in urine. Court's Definition Adopted

The strongest of the compromise restrictions would prevent the endowment from supporting art that is obscene as defined by a 1973 Supreme Court decision. In that case, Miller v. California, the Supreme Court prescribed three tests for obscenity: a work must appeal to prurient interest, contain patently offensive portrayals of specific sexual conduct and lack serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.

Senator Helms's far-reaching measure would have cut off grants for any art that is ''obscene or indecent'' or that ''denigrates the objects or beliefs of the adherents of a particular religion or nonreligion.'' While the Helms proposal did not define indecency, it specifically barred the depiction of sex acts and homosexually oriented erotica.

The conference committee authorized $250,000 to set up a commission to review the endowment's grant-making procedures and determine whether there should be new standards. The 12-member commission would have four members appointed by the Speaker of the House, four by the President pro tempore of the Senate, and four by the President. New Battle Is Likely

The endowment's present statute requires only that grants recognize ''substantial artistic and cultural significance, giving emphasis to American creativity and cultural diversity and the maintenance and encouragement of professional excellence.''

The conference committee report will be returned to the House and Senate next week; none of the leaders are willing to predict what may happen then.

And while advocates of government support for the arts were congratulating one another on their victory today, the prospect of a searching review of endowment procedures sets the stage for a new battle between friends and foes of the agency. That could come next year when the endowment faces its periodic reauthorization; it was last reauthorized by Congress in 1985 for five years.

Representative Sidney R. Yates, the Chicago Democrat who as chairman of the House Interior Appropriations subcommittee engineered the compromise, stopped short of claiming victory. Yet asked if Senator Helms had ''scored any points,'' he replied ''Speaking for myself, I would say not.'' 'An Explosive Issue'

''I hope the House will accept this,'' Mr. Yates said of the compromise, ''but with such an explosive issue you can't ever tell what will happen.''

Senator James A. McClure of Idaho, the ranking Republican on the Interior Appropriations subcommittee and the chief defender of the Helms amendment on the conference committee, said, ''I'm not fully pleased, but it's a way of settling the House-Senate differences.''

For his part, Senator Helms said: ''I won everything. They've gotten a message from Congress.''

On Thursday night the Senate was plunged into a highly charged debate when Mr. Helms appeared unexpectedly on the floor at about 7:30 and offered an amendment to a military spending bill to instruct the Senate to reaffirm the support it had given his amendment by a voice vote late one afternoon in July.

''I'm going to ask that all the pages, all the ladies and maybe all the staff leave the chamber so that Senators can see exactly what they're voting on,'' Mr. Helms said. He then distributed copies of Mapplethorpe photographs considered by some to be pornographic that were included in the federally financed exhibitions.

The debate kept an unusually large number of senators on the floor so late at night, some 60 or 70, and the result was a stinging bipartisan repudiation of the Helms amendment. By a vote of 62 to 35 the senators refused to reaffirm the July action.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

Senator Helms had acted in an effort to regain the initiative from the conference committee, which earlier in the day had moved close to agreement on a legislative package to substitute for his amendment.

The prospect of a roll-call vote had worried many legislators, who feared how a vote against the Helms amendment might by used by future election opponents.

Senator Patrick J. Leahy, a Democrat from Vermont, said to applause that opponents of the Helms amendment worried most that a ''30-second ad might come out of this'' branding them as supporters of pornography. ''Let us not kill the N.E.A.,'' he concluded, ''because we're afraid of the 30-second ad!'' Passages From the Bible

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the New York Democrat, recited with gusto passages from the Book of Revelation that he read from a huge leather-bound Bible on his desk. Turning to Milton and then Chaucer, he said many of the passages he had read would be unacceptable under the Helms amendment.

Mr. Helms, who also drew applause and occasional laughter, at one point quipped, ''I never realized before tonight that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John might apply for a government subsidy.''

Just as Senator Helms's opponents were counting him out, he reappeared on the floor this morning, introducing a nonbinding resolution shorn of a number of restrictions that had been criticized as impossibly broad the night before.

Thus the only prohibition left from the original Helms amendment was ''obscenity.''

The conferees adopted other measures intended to punish the endowment for its role in sponsoring the two exhibits.

The Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, N.C., had showed the Serrano work and the Institute for Contemporary Art in Philadelphia had put together the exhibition that contained the Mapplethorpe photographs that had offended Mr. Helms and others.

The committee dropped a Senate-authorized five-year ban on Federal financial support for the two arts organizations. Instead, it agreed that both organizations would be put on probation for a year and that if the endowment wished to make a grant to either it would have to notify the two congressional committees that oversee the endowment.

The conference committee also accepted House and Senate provisions to cut the agency's overall budget by $45,000 - a sum equal to the amount of the relevant Federal grants to the two arts organizations. But it dropped a Senate proposal to cut $400,000 from the endowment's Visual Arts Program.

Many of these decisions are the result of intense bargaining among leaders of the conference committee. Representative Yates, for example, said his subcommittee pleased Senator McClure when it voted to restore the roads budget of the Forest Service, which the Senate had cut - a matter of importance to the Idaho Senator.

Meanwhile, the Senate confirmed John E. Frohnmayer of Portland, Ore., as chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts.

The 47-year-old Mr. Frohnmayer, confirmed on a voice vote, was critical of the Helms amendment when he appeared before the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee.

''I think that the problem of intrusion and the difficulty in making unfettered artistic judgments would be most difficult to handle under the Helms amendment,'' he said.

We are continually improving the quality of our text archives. Please send feedback, error reports,
and suggestions to archive_feedback@nytimes.com.

A version of this article appears in print on September 30, 1989, on Page 1001001 of the National edition with the headline: Conferees Reject Helms Proposal To Restrict Financing of the Arts. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe